The Chemical Brothers

A distinct ‘end of tour blues’ aura pervaded London’s Olympia for the final show of the Chemical Brothers’ We Are The Night phenomenon.

    The tour started last year and has been on the road for 18 months, the last four of which comprised an action-packed international festival itinerary through the summer, encompassing 40 shows, involving lots of flying and spanning several continents.

    Apart from the fact that it was clearly happy and enjoyable for all involved under the production management of Murray Mitchell and Stuart James’ tour management, the show has been sculpted into one of the most superlative live, interactive audio-visual experiences of the decade, with its fluid amalgam of ideas, images, colours, movement and rhythm, a psychoactive mesh of music and immersive positivity... and the best dance performance ever seen by TPi.

    The choice of Olympia referred back to the seminal sleeve cover shot from Surrender, featuring a sea of hands aloft at a rave some years earlier.

    It was the first time the venue had been used for a rock gig in around 16 years. Initially a somewhat cold and uninviting environment, Olympia was quickly transformed into a molten rocking maelstrom of big beat electronic dance!

STEALTH TACTICS
For set, lighting and visual hardware designer Tom Lesh, We Are The Night was his first work with the band, and right from the outset, it was devised to fit into multiple environments, incorporating both festivals and their own shows.

    Projections have traditionally been an integral to the Chemical Brothers show history, and Lesh wanted to contemporise this element whilst creating a very clean look to the stage. He wanted just The Hub (Tom & Ed’s spaceship) visible at the start, with lighting, video and lasers gradually appearing out of nowhere and layered on top of one another as the show unfolded.

    When it came to choosing an LED screen, he went for Element Labs’ Stealth. He’d used it on Muse in 2006 when it was still quite new, and realised its great potential for medium resolution video and other scenic aspects like transparency and invisibility.

    Supplied by VER via Force 4 and video tech Scott Surridge, the screen morphed into many different formats and sizes on its 10-month journey, ending up in its largest, 17m x 10m version at Olympia.

    For festivals, Lesh wanted something that could be set up easily and moved on to or flown in to the stage in a 30 minute changeover. Element Labs was making hinged screens at the time, so they went out initially with a concertina screen which could be hauled into the roof and pushed down. With the addition of wash lights upstage and on the floor, this allowed them to ‘magic’ a show out of nowhere in festival situations.

    Utilising wash lights upstage of the screen meant they could hook in to whatever fixtures were available, dial in a soft focus and add them to the show via the main grandMA console’s fixture cloning facility. This also gave them the facility to clone any pixel-based LED fixtures available with their touring package PixelLines, and grow the show organically through the festivals.
   
LIGHTING PACKAGE
All lighting for the Olympia gig — and the Chems’ 2008 festival specials package — was supplied by HSL, who, Lesh reported, did an excellent job and paid much attention to detail. The account was project managed for HSL by Mike Oates.

    The heavily back-lit light show was an asymmetric design based on eight sub trusses upstage of the Stealth screen, all raked at various different angles. Each of these at Olympia was rigged with three Robe ColorWash 2500E ATs, two JTE PixelLines and two Martin Pro Atomic strobes and colour changers, with two Robe ColorWash 250E ATs as truss toners.

    On the front truss were nine ColorWash 2500E ATs, six Atomics and six 8-lite Moles. On the deck were six Moles upstage, and 11 PixelLines to illuminate the band and the Hub, along with two lasers and lots of smoke. The whole stage and screen was framed by a Universal Stars LED starcloth.

    The Olympia show included an extra diagonal truss with 12 Atomics and another 12 PixelLines onstage. HSL also supplied an additional 40 Robe ColorWash 575E ATs, 40 PixelLines and 20 Atomics with colour changers, all primarily highlighting the architecture and the audience. The idea was very much to include the venue in the show, specifically as the building itself had been so inspirational.

    Lesh worked closely with Adam Smith from Flatnose George, who created the stunning visuals and recalled a story of plying him gently with mega quantities of espresso in a Portuguese café to persuade him to make the jump to LED screens! All the video was carefully crafted with the screens in mind — so images jumped out of nowhere and then just as seamlessly disappeared.

    Most of the visuals were originated as 35mm film, which was really evident by their deeply textured, silky, filmic quality. There were numerous Chemical Brothers favourites in there including the red and blue dancers, the clown’s face, thousands of insects spewing out of The Hub and, of course, the famous jerky robots. All were augmented by lighting which was colour coded to match whatever was appearing onscreen.

    “Developing the whole show to where it is now has really been an exercise in ‘The Bigger Picture’,” commented Lesh. It was a process that involved close collaboration with artistic director Ricardo Lorenzini, who operated the main grandMA running visuals, lighting and lasers and travelled with it throughout, along with desk programmer Matthew Button.

COHERENT
Show control was a vital component in the imaginative and literal chemistry, with Button instrumental in making the operation coherent and streamlined. SMPTE triggered all the visual mediums, while he and Lorenzini, as operators, had override control of certain elements.

    For video storage and playback on the 2008 tour, Button wanted a lightweight, fully portable solution, particularly in view of the hectic schedule which included 10 shows in 10 days in Australia alone, and plenty of flying within and between other territories.

    He and lighting tech Toby Dennis both invested in MacBook Pros to which they fitted the 32GB Mtron 2.5” solid state hard drives and installed the latest Catalyst media server... and nothing else! The Mtron is turbo-charged to give super-quick video access time.

    The visuals show, originally programmed on a Catalyst Mac G5 desktop, was transferred to the laptops. This enabled them to travel on planes with no fuss, no excess baggage charges and the additional security of knowing that the show was secure and with them at all times. The other big plus of using the laptops was that it reduced the stage right master control footprint by a third in terms of the space required.

    The MacBook Pros (the second was used as a back-up) ran four layers of video footage and proved absolutely rock solid throughout. The Catalyst was triggered by the main grandMA lighting console operated by Lorenzini. The desk also controlled the lasers which were originally programmed on a Pangolin system.

    While the video and grandMA desk Page Change was triggered by timecode, all video intensity and lighting/laser changes could be done ‘live’, so elements of all the visual mediums were readily adjustable, and the operators could move with the organic flow of rhythm, music and ambience.

    A grandMA Ultra Lite also sat at FOH and together with a grandMA Lite onstage in the master position, all were linked via five NSPs. Laser control — for the four 10W Arctos units at Olympia and two on the tour — was linked in via four Pangolin network boxes running their Live Pro software and programmed with ‘Frames’ which could be manually adjusted.

    This proved an ideal way to avoid the show getting ‘detached’ and stuck in a pre-programmed cul-de-sac, whilst also alleviating the boredom that can set in on a long tour where all you have to do is hit the Go button!

    Lorenzini described himself as a ‘chef’ who amassed all the visual ingredients of lights, video and lasers, and cooked up a heady mix of expression and excitement. He commented that when Lesh came onboard and worked with Adam Smith for the first time, it proved a highly productive creative fusion in which Lesh has ensured that all the elements have had room to ‘breathe’.

    ‘Less is more’ is very much something they explored from the start on this, without the fear of letting the stage go dark at certain times.

    For Lorenzini, the video takes centre stage. Lighting comes in to give it a punch, and lasers are the eye candy topping. He’s worked with Adam Smith for several years, and commented: “People should really let those with a film and projection background make their content. It makes a huge difference to the depth and meaning that these visuals can bring to a show”... as opposed to dipping into media server or stock library footage and applying a few wizzy effects.

    Reflecting on his highlights of the tour, Lorenzini picked out Roskilde, where the Chems closed after Neil Young, and Gdansk Airfield in Poland because of its funky setting and the incredible infrastructure that was installed for the event.

    He also thought the Australian tour (where he chose his own supplier, Phaseshift) was a “complete blast”. Ben Sullivan also joined the Chems’ family as stage manager at that point. He’s now based in Australia and comes from a visuals pedigree dating back to hedonistic party days of the late ’80s and The Spot Co in Ealing, West London, a company that spawned so many fantastic ideas and creative people.

    For Olympia, HSL’s crew chief was Simon ‘Piggy’ Lynch and lighting rigger was Rupert Reynolds, who were joined by an HSL crew of Dan Tiley, Tim Oliver, Andy ‘Paris’ Hilton, Rick ‘Avo’ Butler and Jake Sullivan, who was on the Chems crew and also on lighting.

SOUND
FOH engineer Shan Hira has worked with the Chems since 2000 and did the whole We Are The Night tour which he described as “one of the happiest ever”.

    They had just changed the sound system for Olympia to a d&b J-Series line array, comprising 12 J8s and two J12s for the main arrays left and right, with six flown J-Subs per side, plus three ground-stacked J-Subs a side beneath the main hangs, and two blocks of two ground-stacked subs equidistant between the main hang and centre per side.

    The centre hang was six dv-DOSC infills, with flown delays consisting of two subs, four J8s and two J12s per side. All the d&b elements were driven by d&b D12 amplifiers, and the whole system controlled via AES protocol for additional stability.

    This, along with all the rest of the kit, was supplied by Skan, whom Hira has used for some years and commented: “The service is excellent, the gear is in great condition, and their engineers are among the best in the country — they work very hard and to the highest standards.” Scott Esson was his systems tech, joined by Paddy Hocken and Ben Sliwinski.

    Hira mixed the show on a Midas XL4 which he still believes is the best-sounding desk, having tried all the digital options. “For the way I mix this band it’s THE desk,” he affirmed, adding that the XL4’s mic pre-amps and EQ are “great”.

    He toured his own effects rack around the world included a TC M6000 running three engines, an Eventide H3000 harmoniser, a TC D2 delay and a vintage ‘spanner’ panning machine from the ’70s which was sourced by Skan’s Chris Fitch. This was used to pan the sound across the system with speed and direction control.

    Hira has also toured a full tone tape echo which is a remake of an Echoplex, and a Roland Boss RE-20 foot pedal copy of the much loved Space Echo. He used this on selected vocals and riffs, and likes it for its tactility and the fact that you can keep the delay time and increase and decrease the intensity and time differences.

    His other rack featured six BSS 401 comps, and on two of the main channels he used an XL42 mic amp and EQ chained with an Al Smart C2 compressor.

    As far as creativity is concerned, his sonic goal was to make it big, bold, loud and in-the-face. With the band themselves not lit, and the lighting and visuals so bold and iridescent, it was essential that the audio was matched to complete the AV ‘experience’.

    Over on monitors, Ian Barton described his job as more like being a systems engineer in terms of concentrating on the environment, and balancing the sound between Tom and Ed, one of whom wants it really loud and the other who prefers it much quieter!

    The challenges included ensuring it was a clean, clear mix — and that Tom sounded better onstage than out front!

    There were 10 d&b M2 wedges around the sides of the stage and Barton overlaid whichever keyboard was being played at the time into these. The whole mix was centred around two L-Acoustics dv-Subs with two Arcs cabinets on top of each one as rear fills. The nearfield monitors were two L-Acoustics MTD-108s, and the side fills were three L-Acoustics SP28s a side, with three dv-DOSC highs on top per side... making a very low profile side fill.

    Barton used dbx 160XL comps and XTA EQs which he thinks are “the best in the world” with XTA DP428s controlling the rear and near fills. His desk was a Midas H3000 which he really likes, commenting that it would be very hard to work their show on a digital console with multiple things needing doing simultaneously and linked in stereo pairs.

    Onstage L-Acoustics elements were driven by Lab.gruppen amps. and the d&bs by D12s.

    This tour marked Barton’s 25th year in the industry. His first tour was with The Smiths in 1984 during his school summer holiday with Oz PA. As Mott The Hoople’s Ian Hunter once sang, it’s a mighty long way down rock and roll...

TPi

Photography by Louise Stickland